Nowcasting and forecasting outbreaks

epiEngage co-I meeting

Sebastian Funk

https://epiforecasts.io

Who are we?

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk

Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres/centre-mathematical-modelling-infectious-diseases

epiforecasts group

Short-term forecasting can inform decision making

Anticipate healthcare demand

Finger et al., BMC Medicine, 2019

Design interventions

Plan clinical trials

Forecasts can be evaluated/scored

Ebola in West Africa, 2013-16

“We were losing ourselves in details […] all we needed to know is, are the number of cases rising, falling, or levelling off?”

– Hans Rosling, Liberia, 2014

Forecasting Ebola

https://ntncmch.github.io/ebola/

Ebola: how wrong were our models?

Funk et al., PLOS Comp Biol, 2019

COVID-19

30 January,2020

Funk et al., 2020

2 March, 2020

Abbott et al., 2020

August 2020

https://epiforecasts.io/covid/posts/global/

Challenges

  • Difficult to communicate limitations

Difficult to communicate limitations

Challenges

  • Difficult to communicate limitations
  • Difficult to assess impact

Difficult to assess impact

“The Rt estimates generated by the EpiForecasts team were used extensively by the WHO COVID-19 Analytics unit. They formed a core part of two routine analysis pipelines […] regularly presented to the incident management structure at WHO headquarters, including senior management, as well as regional and national WHO offices.”

Challenges

  • Difficult to communicate limitations
  • Difficult to assess impact
  • Initial unavailability of relevant tools

“An 80% right paper before a policy decision is made is worth ten 95% right papers afterwards, provided the methodological limitations imposed by doing it fast are made clear.” – Chris Whitty, former Chief Medical Officer

  • When rapid work matters, the best tool is the one that is available
  • Building better tools now can help us getting things right rapidly later

Tools

EpiNow2

https://epiforecasts.io/EpiNow2/

epinowcast

https://package.epinowcast.org/

Thank you